The Hamster and the Highway

I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been to Washington, DC. School trips in elementary, junior high, and high school, plus several as an adult. The Hamster isn’t even 11 yet and he’s been there twice himself: once about three years ago on a long sightseeing weekend with his sister, his mom, and me, and once last year to meet President Obama and help kickoff to Soldier Ride. DC (at least downtown DC) is fantastic: it’s clean, it’s bustling in the good way that a big city should be, and its architecture is extraordinary. But I was still planning to skip it on our trip through the south. Thing is, you have to drive pretty stinkin’ far to get to the deep south from New York. DC is not only far and close enough to make it a reasonable stopping point, but it’s kind of unavoidably directly on the way to everywhere else we’re going. So I made it our first stop–reluctantly, until I figured out one cool thing neither Sam or I has ever done in DC: tour the Capitol Building.

A word of unsolicited advice: if you ever plan to take a guided tour of the U.S. Capitol, arrange it through the office of your senator or representative. With just one simple phone call and only a few days notice, we were given a tour by an intern in Senator Kirtsen Gillibrand’s (D-NY) office. This meant that the tour started in Senator Gillibrand’s office, which was cool on its own but (much cooler) necessitated a ride in the little Senate subway from the Russell Senate Building to the Capitol.

Going through our Senator also meant that the tour was led by a New Yorker who not only gave us an excuse to talk about home but also made sure to point us in the direction of NY-centric features in the bulding.

From the Capitol we headed over to a pretty good deli called Eli’s for what will probably be the best meal we’ll have all week if not longer, and then south to our second capital city of the day, Richmond, VA.

Richmond is one of those cities that you see on the map and think there must be some cool stuff to do there. But there isn’t. The most exciting thing to do in Richmond is to drive down Monument Avenue, a double-wide street that runs through what claims to be downtown Richmond but looks more like a suburb. The street’s name comes from several statues of famous Virginians that can be found at intervals along about a mile stretch of the road. The statues include Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Arthur Ashe. I believe it was Mr. Rogers who used to sing, “One of these things is not like the other…” My guess is that the Ashe statue is some sort of lame attempt to mitigate the embarassment felt about having giant monuments to the leaders of a bloody attempt to continue the practice of slavery. OK, that’s mostly conjecture, but the Ashe statue is both the smallest of the statues and the furthest from the center of town. It’s also by far the least regal looking, and it almost looks like Ashe can’t decide between keeping a book away from some eager children and beating them with a tennis racket:

We also made a quick stop to see the Virginia State Capitol building, which was nice enough I guess, but seeing it right after seeing the absolutely stunning U.S. Capitol is like eating a pretty good hot dog after spending the day at the Sorbonne.

All told we had a pretty fun first day. Almost 400 miles of driving was exhausting but gave us lots of time to chat and to start spotting license plates from every state, and a we really enjoyed the U.S. Capitol. And at our very last stop we learned the most important lesson of the day: if you keep your eyes open, you can always find love–even at a rest stop in New Kent, VA.

22 days

13 states

4,000 miles

70 hours on the road

And it starts … now!

Last summer, before the Hamster and I embarked on our five-week, 9,900-mile, coast-to-coast, father-son road trip across this great country, I was both excited and terrified, completely unsure of what to expect and how things would turn out in terms of both logistics and our relationship. If you read this blog, you already know that the trip couldn’t have gone much better in either respect: we saw and did dozens of incredible things, and we became so inseparable that Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn were jealous. “The Adventure Boys,” Sam called us. When it was over, all we wanted to do was hop in the car and start the adventure all over again. Well, sleep in our own beds for a night or two first, and then hop in the car.

This summer, however, Sam is a year older and while he very much wanted to spend the summer exploring the rest of the country with me, he also wanted to spend the summer at sleepaway camp with his friends. Ultimately a compromise was born: he’d do both. Today he got back from a month at camp. On Monday we leave for Road Trip 2, a three-week drive through the southeastern United States that will include Washington, DC, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, in roughly that order.

Of course I’ll be blogging again, and I hope you’ll follow our adventures. I’m still finalizing some of the details but one thing is for sure: this trip will be different from the last in several ways. For one, the weather will likely be both hotter and more humid, a bad combination that will mean less time driving with the top down. There will also be less baseball, due mainly to the lack of Major League teams in the region we’re visiting and in part to the unfortunate tendency of several minor league teams to be playing away games on the days we’ll be in their hometowns. At Sam’s request, we’re also planning to be on the road for his 11th birthday. (In fact he requested that we do something “super road-trippy” on his birthday, whatever that means. As it stands now we’ll probably spend at least part of that day driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains, which is supposedly one of the more scenic drives in the country and thus super road-trippy, at least in my mind.) But the biggest difference is that this time, there’s no trepidation–only excitement. As the great philosopher/tax cheat/biofuel entrepreneur Willie Nelson says, I can’t wait to get on the road again.

The Hamster and the Highway is in the news: check out The Jewish Week’s article about our trip and how we managed to keep it kosher.

One final episode of “Interview That Guy,” with guest host Mommy!

[FYI, when he starts talking about squares and triangles at about 1:50, he means that he’d assumed that the Gateway Arch was square, i.e., a bent rectangle, but in fact it was triangle, i.e., a bent triangular prism. Also, later on when he says we saw bongos at the zoo, he’s talking about a kind of animal that looks sort of like a freakishly striped deer, not the musical instrument.]

Some quick stats from our trip:

36: days on the road

8989.0: total miles driven

27.1: average miles per gallon

48.8: average driving speed in miles per hour

176:47: hours and minutes spent in the car together

2: oil changes

3: car washes (stupid highway bugs)

1: set of wiper blades replaced

2: visits from Sarah

22: states visited

4: Abraham Lincoln statues/busts visited

5: Major League baseball games attended

8: Major League baseball stadiums visited

$3.99: highest per-gallon price paid for gas

$3.29: lowest per-gallon price paid for gas

3: meals eaten in restaurants

16: meals eaten in the car

22: meals eaten at highway rest stops

29: postcards mailed to Abby

0: items left behind in hotel rooms

Well, that’s it, I guess. On Monday we made the last two sightseeing stops on our cross-country trip: Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. By the time you read this we may already be back home in New York.

The Hamster continued lamenting the end of the trip but I insisted that he stop focusing on the end and focus instead on enjoying each activity. Perhaps the most enjoyable activity of the day was checking out of and leaving the Clarion Inn in Florence, Kentucky, which was the worst place we’ve stayed in the entire trip, and that’s not an easy title to claim. We had a huge one-bedroom suite comliments of all the rewards points I’ve racked up by spending so many nights in hotels and motels. But free or not, the room was so badly stained everywhere that I wondered if we were  actually sleeping in a Jackson Pollack painting. There were streaks and splotches of various colors on just about every surface: the carpet, the couch, the headboards, the walls, the shower curtain–everywhere.

We had nowhere to go but up, by which I mean Cincinnati. We had only about 4 hours to jam in as much Cincinnati as we could, so we started with Fountain Square, which I guess is like a very small Bryant Park in that it’s in the middle of downtown and hosts frequent concerts, movies, etc. It gets its name from the large fountain in the middle, which looked somehow familiar to me though I couldn’t figure out why.

As I was typing this it suddenly occurred to me where I’ve seen this statue before: in the opening credits for “WKRP in Cincinnati“! I suppose that’s fitting since, as the opening theme song says, I’m definitely “kinda tired of packin’ and unpackin’ / Town to town, up and down the dial.”

Anyway, across the street from the fountain stands Carew Tower, an art deco office building that used to be the tallest building in the city (it’s now the second-tallest) and has an open-air obersvation deck on the roof, 49 stories up. It doesn’t really compare to some of the other, much taller buildings we’ve looked out from but it still gave us some great views of the city.

And at only $2 each, it was an even better bargain than the $1 downtown parking garage where I left the car while we climbed the tower.

At this point it was still too early in the morning for most places to be open so we went to Eden Park, which is a sizeable public park on the riverfront that houses a conservatory, an art museum, some ponds and fountains, and several walking and biking paths. It’s much smaller than, say, Forest Park in St. Louis or Central Park in NY, and it’s in somewhat of a more residential area, but it provided peace, quiet, pretty across-the-river views of Newport, KY, and an opportunity for Sam to feed some ducks and geese.

My original plan for our half-day in Cincinnati was to take a riverboat ride on the Ohio River, but it turns out the sightseeing cruises don’t start until 3 or so and we needed to be on our way to Pittsburgh by then. So instead Sam suggested we substitute a tour of the Reds’ Great American Ball Park.

I had been to a game at Great American before and enjoyed it, but I think I liked it better this time around. Part of the difference was that the last time I went it was for a night game, and ballparks are always etter during the day. But the Reds have also made some small but noticeable improvements since the last time I was there, including adding a vaguely riverboat-shaped party terrace right next to the decorative smokestacks beyond the outfield.

I also really appreciated Scout’s Alley, a sort of mini-museum of the Reds’ scouting department that’s hidden in one of the premium seating sections. Sam liked the ballpark but was more focused on quietly mocking an incredibly annoying woman who was on the tour with us. She voiced considerable amazement at every single thing we saw and wasted everyone’s time with inane questions about the Paul McCartney concert that was held there a few days earlier and the size and location of the stadium’s food prep area, and complaints about the directional signage in the parking garage.

One little bonus of our particular tour was that it was given while Reds Fantasy Camp was havign a reunion game on the field. Sam and I tuned out the crazy woman by watching average schmucks like us play baseball on a major league field, complete with commentary by the team’s announcer and their images on the scoreboard.

After the tour we stopped by the Reds Hall of Fame and Museum, which makes the recently created Mets Hall of Fame at Citi Field look pretty lame by comparison. Of course the Reds have much more history to celebrate but the museum is truly imaginitive, with lots of fun things for both kids and adults to do and creative displays like a huge wall covered with 4,256 baseballs to show the sheer volume of hits Pete Rose collected in his career. I think my favorite part of the museum was a display about Johnny Bench’s his unique ability to hold seven baseballs in one of his enormous hands that gave fans the opportunity to try replicating the feat.

(The seven baseballs I’m holding in this photo are actually attached to each other in the same configuration in which Bench held them. With real, unattached baseballs, the best I could do was five.)

After a quick lunch it was on to our very last stop: Pittsburgh. On the way we passed through a 10-mile sliver of West Virginia, which I hadn’t expected and thus puts us in 22 states over the course of this trip instead of the 21 we expected.

Eventually, though, we did make it to Pittsburgh, where for the first time in a few weeks we were finally able to have dinner at a restaurant. I was happy to have a night off from cooking on the side of a random highway; Sam was elated to finally eat pizza, which he’d been jonesing for since I picked him up from camp. It was lousy pizza but we didn’t care.

After dinner it was time for–what else?–baseball. I didn’t really think about this when I was planning the road trip but it worked out nicely that the last stop of our tour of the country was PNC Park, my favorite major league baseball stadium (and I’ve been to 39 of them, so I kinda know what I’m talking about).

All the ballparks that have been built in the past 15 years are fantastic. But they’re also all kind of the same. Most of them are designed by the same firm and they share a lot of the same features: lots of brick and exposed steel, statues of the team’s best players placed at the entrances, quirky outfield dimensions and wall heights, super-expensive padded seats right behind home plate, a giant glassed-in restaurant in one of the outfield corners, an open promenade behind the center field bleachers, etc. One of the things I love about PNC Park is that it feels the most different and unique out of all of them.

For one thing, its upper deck is lower than it is at most stadiums and its outfield seating is extremely open, giving the park a cozy, almost minor-league feel. Also, there’s no giant, glassed-in restaurant. In fact, a lot of the stuff that new stadiums have for the uberwealthy (posh restaurants, large sections of seating you can only get to through other posh restaurants that, in turn, you can only get to with exclusive tickets, etc.) is either not there or just placed in such a way so that it’s not as obvious. This makes the ballpark feel more like a ballpark and less like a shrine to corporate wealth. There’s also much less focus on all the playground-and-video-game area that every new stadium has for kids. There’s some kid stuff at PNC, but it’s much more subdued, leaving the focus on actually watching a baseball game instead of doing baseball-related things while a baseball game occurs nearby.

A lot of stadiums nowadays celebrate the team’s history with statues and banners of former star players and prominent display of retired numbers. Pittsburgh does this also, but somehow just does it a little bit better than most. Their retired numbers include each player’s name as well, and just look a bit prettier than those of most other teams’. There are player statues at most entrances, but one entrance is dedicated to stars of the Negro Leagues and features not just statues of several of the greatest Negro Leaguers but also interactive touch screen displays about the players. They’ve also scattered little touches around the park, like this cool bust (if that’s what you call this) of Hall-of-Fame Pirates slugger (and longtime Mets announcer) Ralph Kiner’s hands:

Even the mundane stuff is done well and thoughtfully. Most teams show pitch speed on the scoreboard; Pittsburgh shows pitch speed and horizontal and vertical break. The escalators work in reverse so that they take you up at the beginning of the game and back down at the end. Instead of launching ugly sponsor T-shirts into the crowd they launch hot dogs. The Pierogie Race is the second coolest bit of between-inning entertainment behind Milwaukee’s Sausage Race. Even the vendors are cooler. Well, at least this one guy is:

By far the ballpark’s best feature, though, is the view of the city skyline. A few other teams have something like this (the skyline view in St. Louis is especially beautiful) but the openness of the PNC Park outfield, the location both right on the water and right in the middle of downtown, and the presence of the Pirates-yellow suspension bridges (which, by the way, in a very cool touch are closed to cars immediately before and after games so fans can teem across them) just makes the view of Pittsburgh much, much more breathtaking than any non-Pittsburgher would ever expect the view of downtown Pittsburgh to be.

As the game ended Sam and I congratulated each other on surviving this crazy trip, the Pirates congratulated each other on an exciting victory, and fireworks exploded above the outfield. It was a great way to end a fun night and a great way to end an extraordinary adventure that neither of us will ever forget.

As soon as we woke up Sunday morning we could already sense it: the end of the trip is coming, and it’s coming fast. We woke up in St. Louis but by lunchtime we were not in Kentucky, having crossed southern bits of Illinois and Indiana along the way. By nightfall we’d be in Ohio.

We had also crossed back into Eastern Time, which put a big, bright exclamation point on our increasing proximity to home. The feeling was inescapable.

All we could talk about in the car was the end of the trip: how we couldn’t believe it was already here, how we had only a few more stops, how we’d be home in just two days, how we’d have to go back to more normal behavior and habits, how Sam would have to get used to not being the center of the universe, how we can’t wait to see Abby, what we’ll be doing over the next couple of weeks, and on and on.

I was glad that our adventures in Louisville took our minds off the end for a few hours. Louisville Slugger was extremely cool. We got there just in time for a tour of the factory, where we saw five-pound cylinders of ash or maple turn into two-pound, custom-ordered baseball bats right before our eyes. We watched the Louisville Slugger logo being burned right onto the bats, learned how to tell ash bats from maple bats while watching a game on TV, saw unfinished ash bats being hand-dipped into black stain and hung to dry, and got free souvenir minibats.

[This is probably a good point to apologize for the lack of photos in this post. I took plenty of pictures of all our exploits today but I managed to leave the cable that connects my camera to my computer in my car. We’re on the second floor of a hotel that has no elevator, and I’m just too damn tired to go get the cable. Feel free to check back in a day or two and there’s a good chance I will have added photos to this post.]

The museum part wasn’t nearly as interesting but it did contain a few gems, including the original stamps for the signatures of every player ever signed to a Louisville Slugger contract from Babe Ruth to Ike Davis. One of the more intriguing names was Go-Go Russel, a minor leaguer from the 1970s who went by that nickname to avoid being treated as the famous child actor he had been; went he later went back to acting he also went back to his first name, Kurt.

The other especially fun part of the museum was being able to hold and swing one of Mickey Mantle’s game-used bats (Sam chose to swing David Ortiz’s instead). We also hit the on-site indoor batting cage, where were were able to use bats that were not game used but were made to the specifications of certain Major League players. Well, I was–they were all too heavy for Sam so he used an aluminum model. I did pretty well with a David Wright model: 34 inches long, 31.5 ounces.

Across town,we arrived at famed Kentucky Derby racetrack Churchill Downs just in time to take the last tour of the day. It’s exactly as regal as I’d expected and much larger. But the tour (which was “free” with paid admission to the Kentucky Derby Museum) was extremely cursory. It took only about 20 minutes, largely because our tour guide took us to the paddocks (basically the horses’ locker room) and the winner’s circle and nowhere else. Any other part of the grounds he mentioned was merely pointed out from a distance. Still, it was pretty cool to practically stand on the most storied racetrack in America. I don’t know a whole lot about horseracing and Sam knows a lot less than that, but we both still appreciated the history and recognized several of the Derby winners’ names. (OK, I recognized several of the names. Sam knew Secretariat from the recent Disney movie.) Sam was especially amused by the sign that warned, “All ponies must be kept beyond this point,” mostly because we’ve never been anywhere such instructions were necessary. 

After the lucky timing of our first two stops we struck out at stop #3: by the time we got around to visiting Colonel Harlan Sanders’ grave the cemetery was closed. We did notice and appreciate the KFC that was practically right outside the cemetery gates, though.

On the way out of town we made one more quick stop so ridiculous that it made a visit to Colonel Sanders’ grave seem necessary by comparison. Under an overpass for Interstate 64 is a public pay parking lot, outside of which sits a small plaque. The plaque commemorates the origin of the song “Happy Birthday to You, ” which was written in Louisville by two women. Yes, it took two people to write a song that has four words. Why the plaque is in that exact spot I’m not sure, and the plaque itself doesn’t say. But that didn’t stop me from paying tribute to the 19th-century songwriting duo by singing their classic in front of their plaque. Sam was not amused but I made him take a picture of the event anyway.

(He took the picture with my phone, which I did not leave in the car, thus enabling me to download this one photo.)

It was a fun day despite all the talk of the end of the trip. We capped it off by driving an hour and change to Cincinnati, stopping along the way to grill knockwurst for dinner (just to mix it up a little).

Tomorrow we’ll spend a few hours exploring Cincinnati and then head to Pittsburgh for one last ballgame before we head home. And we’ll probably spend a lot more time lamenting the inevitable end of this extraordinary journey.

“Man … St. Louis … wow! It’s just the best.”

Thus spake Samster the Hamster on the way back to our hotel late Friday afternoon. I think it’s safe to say he enjoyed our time in St. Louis. I don’t blame him. As great as Thursday was, Friday was even better.

We started the day with a bit of early-morning grocery shopping followed by our second oil change of the trip. With that out of the way it was all fun for the rest of the day.

It’s hard to know where to begin to describe City Museum. For one thing, calling it a museum is pretty inaccurate. It’s more like the most creative, enormous, distubring, fun playground I’ve ever seen. Sam called it “an art adventure park,” which is a remarkably good description. Even paying for admission became an unexpectedly amusing experience when the tatooed, everywhere-pierced, vaguely Christina Aguilera-looking clerk told Sam that his terrycloth yarmulke was a “great yarmulke for summer” and then mimed using it to mop sweat.

She suggested we start our visit on the roof, and I wasn’t surprised that she was right. Sam headed straight into the driver’s seat of the school bus that’s attached to the roof so that the front half of it is actually sticking out past the edge and hovering precariously 10 stories over the sidewalk.

We climbed up, down, over and all sorts of imaginitive structures (almost everything is big enough for adults to do, too) and swung on a big rope hanging from the ceiling in the middle of a huge empty room before heading for the most popular part of the whole building: the 10-story slide.  It’s exactly what it sounds like: a spiral slide that basically goes from the roof all the way down.

At the bottom the slide dumps you into a hunormous, two-story-high room called the Enchanted Caves: a series of caves and tunnels so elaborate there was no way to adequately photograph or even describe it. The room was very dimly lit, the tunnels were even darker, and there were dozens and dozens of them intertwining and leading to more tunnels and new areas and eventually somehow back into the center of the room,which was full of stalactites and stalagmites and carved with various large creatures  including fish, panthers, and an enormous dragon with glowing eyes.

Whenever I’m watching a movie or TV show and there’s a scene that shows the bad guy’s elaborate evil lair–like with crazy moving sidewalks and trap doors and retina scanners and alligator pits and stuff–I can’t help but imagine the conversations the bad guy had with his contractor when the place was being built. “And in this hallway I want poison-tipped darts to be able to shoot out of the wall. From both sides. Does that sound doable?” As I followed Sam through the labyrinth I was thinking mostly about how I’d be able to squeeze through the next opening but also about what kind of crazy, creative, psychotic, fun person designed the place and how he/she convinced someone to build it.

After getting momentarily stuck a few times too many I elected to stay in the middle of the room while The Hamster explored further. He would disappear into one cave or another, then reappear from a completely different area a minute or two later or call to me from some ledge above my head. Sometimes he would stop by to tell me breathlessly about something he found, like a turtle pond or a lighted blue geyser or a tunnel lined with hundreds of gloves so that it grabs you as you crawl through. This process continued for about a half hour, and then Sam didn’t come back. For a long time. Maybe 15 minutes. Maybe 20. I don’t really know, I didn’t look at my watch, but it seemed like much too long. I started to worry. I called for him–not that he could hear me with all the noise and echoes from other kids and parents. I began crawling through random tunnels thinking he might be stuck somewhere. Eventually I found an exit, and there he was, sitting with a museum employee. Turns out he had gone through so many tunnels that he ended up in a completely different part of the museum without even realizing it, and then when eventually found his way back to the cave complex they wouldn’t let him in because children have to be accompanied by adults. When I found him he had been sitting there for only a couple of minutes and instead of being concerned he was excited to show me the fun places he had found.

Sam’s not the kind of kid who effuses about his experiences while they’re happening. He tends to focus on absorbing everything he’s experiencing and saves his gushing about it until later. This time, though, he was so amazed by everything that he couldn’t hold it in.

“Dad, this is so fun!”

“Dad, this is awesome!”

“Let’s go over there, I see someone flying!”

“Dad, we can go on top of us! C’mon!

“This is so cool!”

“I have no idea where I am, and that is a good sign!”

We climbed through a giant plaster whale, watched turtles sitting on a floating rock, swung from fake tree branches, ducked inside a model train set, marveled at a 100-foot pencil made of real wood and lead and topped with a real giant eraser …

In the car on the way from the museum to Forest Park he suggested that we move to St. Louis.

“Dad, we need to move to St. Louis. It’s a great town. It’s got the Arch, the Cardinals, kosher restaurants, City Museum (the best museum on Earth) …”

Forest Park, by the way, is like the Central Park of St. Louis. I don’t simply mean it’s a big park in the middle of the city; it’s enormous, with multiple sections, a world-class art museum, a zoo, a pond, and some leftover from the 1904 World’s Fair. More impressive than all of this was that, very much unlike Central Park, Forest Park has lots of free curbside parking all along its internal streets. Maybe we should move here.

Once inside the park we headed for the Boathouse, which is both a waterfront restaurant and an actual boathouse that rents kayaks and paddle boats for use on the pond. We hopped into a paddle boat and spent the net 45 minutes or so meandering, enjoying the peaceful view, watching some ducks, rescuing a discarded traffic cone from under the water (Sam’s idea and Sam’s execution), and noticing that it was getting pretty hot and humid out. Back on land we cooled off a bit by dipping our feet into a beautiful nearby fountain.

Next up was the St. Louis Zoo. I’ve generally been steering Sam away from zoos and aquariums throughout this trip because we can go to those anytime when we’re in New York so I’d much rather do things we can’t do at home. But for St. Louis I was a little tired of planning itineraries so I gave Sam several choices that I’d culled from the various recommendation of friends and let him pick what we would do. He decided it would be City Museum, paddle boats, the zoo, and then maybe back to the Arch if there was time. I didn’t mind that he picked the zoo because I know how much he loves animals, the St. Louis Zoo is considered one of the best in the country, it would give us a chance to do some walking, and (best of all) it’s free.

The zoo was great–for a little while. As we reparked and went inside I noticed that, after being sunny all day, the sky had suddenly gotten extremely cloudy. We saw some cool animals in the zoo but after 20 minutes we heard thunder. Not a clap of thunder but a long, low rumble–the kind that makes you wonder if it’s thunder or a whole convoy of 18-wheelers driving by. A few minutes later we felt a drop, which turned into a drizzle, which grew into a steady downpour that lasted for a couple of hours. Incredibly, it was the first bad weather we’d had on the enitre trip.

When I was planning this trip I knew full well that three-quarters of our activities were outdoors and one of my big worries has been that the weather would mess things up for us. Baseball games, hot air balloon rides, national park visits–so much depended on good weather, and we got that good weather everywhere we went. We’ve had a few sunshowers here and there but they never lasted more than a few minutes and they always came while we were in the car (with the roof on). I’ve been in awe of our luck with the weather but afraid to say anything for fear that doing so would bring rain.

The funny thing is that we didn’t really mind the rain. At least, not enough to deter us. The more it rained the more people left the zoo, which just made it easier for us to go where we wanted and see what we wanted to see. We got soaked but we were too busy seeing cool animals to care very much. We definitely abbreviated our trip but still managed to see all the animals Sam really wanted to see. Without a doubt my favorite moment came courtesy of the orangutans, which happen to be Sam’s favorite animal at the moment. When we got to them we saw two of them covering themselves with burlap sacks and scurrying to get out of the rain. They settled down up against the glass right in front of where we were standing, one cuddling and grooming the other.

This was my favorite momet not just because I knew how much Sam was loving it but because of what came next. The other people there were speculating that the cuddling orangutan was the husband and the one being cuddled was the wife. As we were walking away a few minutes later Sam, a bit annoyed, said, “Why does everybody think it’s a husband and wife? Maybe it’s a dad and son.”

I didn’t know it until the moment he said those words, but that comment was exactly what I was looking for when I decided to take him on an all-summer, cross-country road trip. Yes, I was looking for adventure and I was looking for new experiences and I was looking for an excuse to finish my ballpark quest and I was looking for a way to see Mount Rushmore and the world’s biggest ball of twine, but mostly I was looking to have an experience with my son that was so intense and so positive and so memorable and so … moving … that when he sees one ape taking loving care of another he thinks of us.

When we left the zoo I checked my watch and decided we had just enough time for one more treat before heading back to our refreshingly nice room at Springhill Suites for showers and dinner and sleep. (I say refreshingly nice not because I was expecting any less but because we’s been staying in such dives all week long.) So I took Sam to Ted Drewes, the roadside shop famous for making frozen custard a St. Louis delicacy. To the uninitiated, it’s very similar to ice cream but slightly denser and with the slightest hint of a tang to it. Sam was apprehensive because he dislikes custard, but he was willing to give it a try. We loved it so much that after we each finished our own we got another one to share, which prompted Sam to remark in disbelief, “You’re letting me do a lot of things on this trip that you would never let me do at home.”

I could say the same to him.

This was big for me.

If you’ve been reading this blog, or if you’ve ever met me, you probably have a rough idea of the role of baseball in this trip. Half our stops have been baseball related: ballpark tours, ballgames, the Hall of Fame, the Field of Dreams, and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. On Sunday we’ll be in Louisville, Kentucky, to see (among other things) the Louisville Slugger factory. All lots of fun, but to me that’s just the tip of the Hank Greenberg.

Far more significant is that this trip has finally allowed me to complete a quest I started about 10 years ago: to see a ballgame in every Major League Baseball stadium. For years, every summer I took at least one trip to at least one stadium I hadn’t seen. At different times I’ve dragged along friends, brothers-in-law, and my wife and/or kids. I even went on one trip myself. The whole thing has taken longer than I expected, partly because baseball teams keep tearing down the stadiums I’ve visited to build new ones. As a result of the MLB construction boom I’ve been to stadiums that no longer exist in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Detroit, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. Each trip has been wonderful in its own way. Well, except for the trip to the old Tiger Stadium, during which my plane had engine trouble halfway to Detroit and had to return to New York only to discover that the problem was just a faulty “engine trouble” light on the instrument panel but nonetheless causing me to miss the first inning of the game, which featured Angels pitcher Chuck Finley striking out four (yes, four) Detroit batters in the inning.

When Sam and I left New York four weeks ago I had three ballparks left: Target Field in Minneapolis, Safeco Field in Seattle, and the new Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Thursday night I completed the cycle.

It was not intentional that my last ballpark ended up being St. Louis, but it was quite fitting. I’m a Mets fan through and through but if I have a second favorite team it’s the Cardinals, and has been for as long as I can remember. Pretty much everyone I know has seen me wearing a Cardinals cap at some point, starting with a fitted cap that a cousin from St. Louis gave me as a 13th birthday gift. I wore that cap almost every day until I accidentally left it in a hotel room when I was 15. A year later I bought a replacement that I subsequently wore out so thoroughly that by the time I finished high school it was no longer red and could barely be considered a hat. When a gust of wind blew it off my head and under a city bus’s tires on my commute to college one day I only loved it more. At this point the hat is so dilapidated that the cardboard inside the bill has completely disintegrated. I’ve replaced it a couple of times with redder, cleaner Cardinals hats but I still wear the disintegrated one when I’m doing handy work around the house.

But finishing my quest in St. Louis was better than just seeing the team whose hats I like to wear and/or accidentally destroy. Everything I love about baseball came together tonight. I would say the night was perfect but somehow that seems to understate just how perfect it was. The weather was extraordinary: temperatures in the high 70s with the slightest breeze and clear skies. Our seats were excellent: field level right behind home plate. The game was riveting: the top two teams in the division, each with its ace on the mound and a potent lineup. The Brewers jumped out to an early 2-0 lead only to give it back in the form of home runs from the most unlikely (Rafael Furcal) and likely (Albert Pujols) Cardinals hitters. Lots of strikeouts, double plays, clutch hits, and an important win for the home team in front of a robust, enthusiastic crowd. Victory fireworks exploding above the scoreboard. And we got to watch Pujols, one of the best hitters in the history of the game, put on a show: 4-for-4 including a game-tying home run and a rare triple.

Best of all, I got to share this perfect night with someone I love, someone who appreciated it as much as I did. I didn’t say a word all day about completing my stadium tour, but as soon as we settled in our seats Sam turned to me and said, “Congratulations, Dad.” We shared a bag of peanuts. We pointed out details of the stadium and of the game to each other. We got ready to catch foul balls. We made fun of Brewers infielder Yuniesky Betancourt. We had a great time.

And the ballpark: what a gorgeous ballpark! Before we were even off the highway we could see it nestled into downtown just like every ballpark should be. The building is all brick, in perfect Cardinal red. The outside is stunning, timeless, and really, really … ballparky.

The inside is even nicer, and has (no offense to Pittsburgh or Cincinnati) the best backdrop in baseball, with the prettiest parts of the skyline prominently visible beyond the outfield walls.

Every stadium built in the past 20 years has attempted to blend modernity with an old-time feel. Some are more successful than others. Busch Stadium does it so well that even Sam noticed. (“It’s kind of old and kind of new at the same time.”) It also manages to incorporate the history of the team and the city with touches like the names of concession stands (Gashouse Grill, Dizzy’s Diner, etc.), the championship flags above the scoreboard, and the views of the Old Courthouse and the Gateway Arch, rather than by simply blanketing the place inside and out with photos of players like too many other ballparks do. Even Big Mac Land, a McDonalds-branded outfield seating section from Mark McGwire’s home run heyday, is resurrected here.

The stadium has its flaws (the concourses are too dark, the out-of-town scoreboard shows only one league’s games at a time, the bathrooms aren’t so nice, the crowd did the wave instead of watching the eighth inning, etc.) but overall I couldn’t have asked for a better end to my quest.

I was worried that Thursday night’s game would leave me feeling a little like Inigo Montoya after he finally completes his lifelong quest by killing the six-fingered man: fulfilled but a bit lost and unsure of what comes next. But instead I find myself thoroughly satisfied and even energized.

Despite having missed the four strikeouts in Detroit, I’ve witnessed some incredible things at various ballparks over the years. I watched a Blue Jays game from a hotel room window inside the SkyDome. I saw an inside-the-park home run in Philadelphia. A triple play at Shea. Sammy Sosa’s 50^th and 51^st home runs in a Wrigley Field double header in 1998. McGwire’s 61^st home run receiving a standing ovation when shown on the big screen at a game in Pittsburgh’s old Three Rivers Stadium. An Expos outfielder using the tarp as a Slip ’N Slide at a rained-out Expos “home” game at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan, Puerto Rico. A Cuban umpire flattening an anti-Castro protester at a Cuba-Orioles exhibition game at Camden Yards. The A’s successfully using their centerfielder as a fifth infielder in extra innings at Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay. Robin Ventura’s playoff game-winning, 15^th-inning grand-slam single at Shea Stadium.

Toward the end of “Field of Dreams,” Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones) sums up America’s relationship with baseball but, I think, also sums up the role baseball has played in my own life:

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and could be again.”

I may have run out of new stadiums to visit, but there will always be another ballgame to go to, another incredible feat or milestone to witness. Besides, Sam’s on a stadium quest of his own now. By the end of this trip he will have attended games at 11 different major league stadiums and taken guided tours of 3 others. That leaves 16 stadiums for him to see. And about 10 months for us to plan next summer’s trip …